August 25, 2016

Demographic reconquest of the blue states through local migration of Republicans

Whether or not Trump wins, we will need to restore balance to the blue states -- either to make his re-election all the more likely, or to secure victory in 2020.

We could try to convert Democrats in blue states, but that seems unlikely in such a partisan polarized climate. We could also try to organize the unorganized -- the up to 40% of the eligible population that doesn't turn out to vote. That is more promising, and needs to be done, but it requires a lot of time and effort.

An idea popped into my head about how to solve the problem, by having developed an anti-cuckservative intuition. Their response to the blue-ification of the states has been to get all depressed, view everyone else as irredeemable scum, and fantasize about retreating to a safe red state where they will no longer be polluted by the blues.

If these people have only continued to fail, then we ought to do the opposite. Move to the blue states ourselves, view the local liberals as annoying twerps but not subhuman scum, and be cheerful about our ability to swamp them in numbers and tilt the federal government in our direction. If they are allowed to turn Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina blue, then why aren't we allowed to colonize them? Two can play at the carpet-bagger game.

I'll assume the state of affairs after the 2012 election -- with the Trump re-alignment, we will narrow the gap even further in swing states and blue states. The 2012 numbers are the best we can work with right now.

First, identify the states with the narrowest gap in votes between Obama and Romney -- individuals, not percentage points. The goal is to at least tie the Democrats. This will require the least amount of migration, which people will understandably not all be open to considering.

Second, we rank them by how many Electoral votes we would get by taking them over. Express this as a return-on-investment ratio -- Electoral votes divided by popular vote gap. Since Electoral votes don't vary so widely, this mostly boils down to how narrow or wide the vote gap is, but still useful in the ROI form.

Finally, locate which states have large populations of Republican voters who could potentially move to the target blue states. Sheer numbers matter, not percent of the state's electorate. Individuals will be moving, not percentage points. These are the large-population states, which also happen to be mostly blue.

In fact, we only want to move Republicans from blue states -- if we moved them from red ones, we'd risk losing the red status of the source state. But if a state is already safely blue, we can lose every single Republican there and not affect the outcome of the source state. So, we are looking at safely blue, large-population states -- California, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts.

At the same time, we don't want to disrupt the regional and local cultures of the source or target state.

To turn Wisconsin red, we don't want to send brash New Yorkers to do the job -- better for Chicago metro residents to waltz over the border and set up in the Milwaukee metro, or the Minneapolis metro. Others outside Chicago can cross into Iowa. And others still into Michigan and Ohio (which could also be helped by handfuls of Republicans in Indiana, Kentucky, and West Virginia).

Californian Republicans will take care of the West -- northern-ish ones can take Oregon and Washington, as well as Colorado, while the southern-ish ones can take Nevada (Las Vegas) and perhaps New Mexico if we want it.

The South is largely safe, but we can have lowland Southerners move into the northern Florida region, which is culturally similar. With such safe red states, we can afford some of them to also move into Georgia, which is under carpet-bagger assault, and especially North Carolina -- which can also get reinforcements from Tennessee, on the Appalachian side.

Maryland will provide Republicans to settle Northern Virginia (same DC metro area culture), while also getting some help from Tennessee in the Appalachian part of Virginia.

Marylanders will also move into Pennsylvania, either central if they're looking to get away from so much chaos, or into the broad Philly metro if they want to remain in the ACELA corridor. The Philly metro will receive Republicans from New Jersey, particularly those who are already in the Philly metro but on the NJ side of the border. Northern New Jerseyans can also join Philly, or Scranton and other eastern PA cities if they're looking to get away from the NYC megalopolis.

New York state Republicans could move to solidify Pennsylvania -- Philly if ACELA seeking, central or western if they want a more Upstate environment. Those in the NYC area can move into Connecticut, and those far upstate into New Hampshire.

Massachusetts, too, will send its Republicans into Connecticut and New Hampshire.

Winning over these swing and light-blue states, we will have about 370 Electoral votes, with a comfortable 100-vote buffer in case we lose some of them by chance.

Depending on the size of the gap in House and Senate races, this could spill over into securing even more seats in Congress. Not to mention electing Governors, state legislators, judges, and so on at the state level.

I'm not going to go through all the numbers, but it's all feasible numerically. The only difference is what percent of a source state's Republicans would have to migrate.

Let's just take Illinois, though, as a medium-level migration to convert Wisconsin and Minnesota. The gap to close both states requires 440K Republicans, and Illinois had 2.1 million of them. So about 20% of IL Republicans would be needed to settle WI and MN. Given how culturally similar they are, they might not mind it, or even enjoy getting out of Chiraq.

Each target state has 10 Electoral votes, for a total of 20 -- which is how many Illinois itself has. In other words, these 20% of IL Republicans who could never in a million years help to win their own state, could bring an equivalent number of Electoral votes by moving to neighboring states and swelling the numbers of Republican voters.

Would this be so awful upon them? I'll bet a lot of people currently residing in Illinois actually have family roots in Wisconsin or Minnesota, so this would be more of a return to their roots rather than being rootless transplants who would destabilize their adoptive state. Ditto for people living in the DC metro of Maryland, or the NYC metro, whose families actually came from Pennsylvania.

This reversal of the megalopolis magnet would restore more of a traditional balance to the states that have lost so many residents to the big big big cities. Nowadays, it's not enough to live in Milwaukee or Minneapolis -- you have to live in the biggest city possible nearby, and that's Chicago. Moving back to the second-tier cities and smaller towns that your ancestors came from is sorely needed in our deracinated Borg-city world.

The same percent of California Republicans -- 20% -- would have to move in order to restore balance to Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, for a haul of 39 Electoral votes. Not as much as winning California itself, but good enough.

The other examples are left as exercises for the reader.

Ideally, those who have the least to lose would move, while the 80% with the most to lose would stay put and hold down the fort so that CA, IL, etc. don't become 100% Democrat. Younger people, looking to start a family, lower cost of living, jaded about their college-years search for a hip city that turned out to be way too expensive to live in, and so on. Listless middle-aged people who don't have kids or whose kids are out of the house. Retirees looking to find a quieter and saner place to live out their years.

Moving is a daunting decision, but that's why it should be at the most local scale possible. It could be as simple as the Republicans of southern New Jersey moving 30 minutes away onto the Pennsylvania side, while remaining in the same metro area and able to stay in touch with friends and family, and suddenly PA is a toss-up state.

Those choosing to locally migrate in order to boost the concentration of Republicans in blue states to turn them red, would still be giving something up -- but it would be for the greater good of the nation, making it impossible for someone like Crooked Hillary Clinton to ever get elected.

This is why I don't worry so much about the Democrats countering our colonization -- they're too obsessed with living in or near the mega-cities, and aren't as willing to sacrifice for the greater team. Too individualistic and status-obsessed. In the same way that Virginia is no longer palatable for Republicans, a newly red state of Wisconsin would drive the local Democrats into the sanctuary of Chicago.

The best part is that these massive changes in who controlled the federal government would all take place despite the Republicans only winning a minority of the national popular vote, as Romney did. We simply deploy our soldiers away from where they are of no use, and toward where they would make a big difference.

And even this not-so-great level of migration would be lessened if we were also doing the necessary work to organize the unorganized in the target blue states. And more Democrats and Independents will be open to voting for the Party of Trump once the populist movement really starts to sink in.

This analysis is just to show how even a Romney candidate could have won if the Republican voters had resisted the call of mega-cities and stayed in second-tier blue states or swing states.

If the Democrats were fielding candidates like Bernie, it wouldn't be so urgent to contain the threat of blue state Dem voters. But with them threatening the nation with Crooked Hillary Clinton, we have to act to isolate their Electoral College power. Let them have their handful of deep blue states, the way that Republicans have had their handful of marginalized deep red states. We need to take back the Great Big Middle, and there's nothing like a little colonization to do the trick -- which in many cases will really be a restoration to the mover's family roots anyway.

I was born in Minnesota, but by now the extended family is more scattered, so I'm more rooted staying where I am.

At this point, Trump's chances are seeming more and more dismal, so I think the actual opportunity for Republicans might have been voting in the Democratic primary (which is the real election in many one-party areas).

"Dismal" meaning ahead in the USC poll (inheritor of RAND methodology from 2012, most accurate), tied in another top performer Reuters (adjusting for their intentional 5-point bias), and both w/in m.o.e. in Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, etc.

October surprise from WikiLeaks, and debate dominance = bye-bye.

You're making a classic pseudo-quant mistake of projecting too far into the future from today, especially knowing of major reversals ahead (WikiLeaks, debates). If one weekend's baseball game gets rained out, might as well just cancel the whole season, right?